Runaway train on Northern Line: report issued

[Tom]

Jun 19, 2011 0:54:36 GMT railtechnician said:

It seems that the acknowledged experts, the ERU, were at best not listened to and at worst ignored, had they been in charge they would no doubt have sought knowledge from a higher authority as they had not dealt with towing an RGU before.

My personal experience with the ERU is they tend to go in all guns blazing and attempt to take charge of an incident, despite being requested in a support role.

This of course is not their first incident where their handling of a train with isolated brakes has resulted in the train running away. (Aldgate 2005 being the other one I can remember.)

[Phil]

One thing keeps nagging at me. The RGU was hired in. It had failed and caused huge delays on the Jubbly a couple of weeks before. It had also failed apparently (temporarily - it was fixed) somewhere on the Circle/Met the previous day.
So why didn't one of the LU engineering staff have the guts to say to the owners "That's it - too many failures running into traffic hours. Take it away to your works for proper repair: we're not paying for any more hire until you can guarantee it won't fail and cause delay to services anywhere on our system"?

Or is the post-Tubelines chain of engineering command so convoluted that no individual has the power to do so any more???

[railtechnician]

Jun 19, 2011 1:28:10 GMT Colin said:

I have obviously misunderstood your reply #17 above. Never mind - you have clearly misunderstood the point myself & Tom are making so it looks like we're all misunderstanding each other....

Let's be clear, there are absolutely no red herrings being used to cover anything up. As you know full well, traffic hours can be extended but engineering hours cannot. Once engineering hours finish and traffic hours start, responsibility for the railway passes to service control under the management of a given line's service manager (used to be known as the DOM).

Service control, whose job it is to run a revenue earning passenger service, had an engineering hours issue dumped on their laps. They took responsibility for it quite legitimately. That is no red herring but a bona fide fact.

Colin,

Yes let's be clear! The red herrings that I am referring to are your comments regarding wedgelock couplers and passenger stock assisting passenger stock and the idea that everyone with a bit of scrambled egg on his peak is qualified, licensed and competent to do everything!

You correctly state as I already have done that the railway was in the hands of service control, it being traffic hours, but service control had no expertise in handling the stalled RGU. You have suggested that it was okay for them to simply accept without question the competence of those on site and that is what I have trouble with. In my experience controllers are very fussy about the detail when there are exceptional circumstances 'on their patch' in traffic hours.

The RAIB report contains a great deal of information, but crucially what events occured immediately prior to the RGU being towed away are barely covered. Somebody had to be in charge on site but there is no mention of it probably because nobody on site was qualified to do what was done and to take responsibility for it.

No responsibility and no accountability is the picture that is presented although it is not so stated because the RAIB does not lay blame. That is a point which you cannot argue.

I expect that since the incident lots of people have been busy crossing t's, dotting i's and jumping through hoops to get rules, regulations and procedures written/upgraded and that can only be a good thing. No doubt there were lessons to be learned by service controllers on all lines.

I admit to being surprised that ERU skills were apparently unlicensed and based upon exercises and previous experience in the age old railway tradition of 'on the job' learning which I thought had been swept away universally across LUL in the 1990s in favour of various licensing schemes. No doubt there is plenty of training and licensing to be done in that department.

The key question remains "What was the established chain of command?" and the answer is that there wasn't one. What there should have been to deal with the stalled RGU was an Incident Master qualified and licensed to take charge on site and liaise with service control and a generic procedure to cover the towing of engineering vehicles whether by assiting service or passenger stock and covering all eventualities.

[railtechnician]

Jun 19, 2011 8:54:12 GMT Tom said:

Jun 19, 2011 0:54:36 GMT railtechnician said:

It seems that the acknowledged experts, the ERU, were at best not listened to and at worst ignored, had they been in charge they would no doubt have sought knowledge from a higher authority as they had not dealt with towing an RGU before.

My personal experience with the ERU is they tend to go in all guns blazing and attempt to take charge of an incident, despite being requested in a support role.

This of course is not their first incident where their handling of a train with isolated brakes has resulted in the train running away. (Aldgate 2005 being the other one I can remember.)

I worked with ERU quite often, once with a stalled train at Heathrow and once with a derailment at Ealing Common depot but frequently on broken rails and the odd signalling emergency. I have also been around when they have been moving damaged stock. Basically I saw them mostly as teams of labourers with some individual specialist skills. Brute force often substituted for failed machinery or more subtle techniques so I do take your point although I think it really does depend on which crew one gets.

In this instance there is no suggestion that they took charge or attempted to do so, in fact although the report suggests that the two ERU staff were there to assist it does not detail that they did anything except observe and pass comment!

ERU were requested to assist by service control and that having been done service control assumed that everything was under control, presumably ERU control. A very poor assumption but understandable if service control believes that ERU are the bees knees. Thus I see this perhaps as 'buck passing'.

[Tom]

Jun 19, 2011 12:56:46 GMT Phil said:

So why didn't one of the LU engineering staff have the guts to say to the owners "That's it - too many failures running into traffic hours. Take it away to your works for proper repair: we're not paying for any more hire until you can guarantee it won't fail and cause delay to services anywhere on our system"?

Quite simply, who else has the machinery to do rail grinding in a metro/tube environment, especially considering our loading gauge?
Nobody except Schweerbau.

This is one of the reasons that all rail grinding activities on LU ceased after the event - there wasn't another firm who could do the work.

And lest we forget that Speno (who do a lot of main line grinding in Europe) have also got issues with keeping rail grinders under control, as demonstrated in the Netherlands where one overran a terminal station and went straight through a shop.

[angelislington]

Just a little point, guys - this thread does seem to be doing a bit of roundyroundy now with opinions and viewpoints which aren't shared by all... let's not forget that the breakaway wouldn't have occurred in the first place were it not due to a failed coupling. Keep happy and nice to each other or I'll put on my stompy boots!

[Deleted]

Probably a stupid question. How did Train 107 get to Archway station on the Southbound if there was a RGU between it and the tunnel portal?

[DWS]

Jun 20, 2011 14:33:16 GMT @banana9989 said:

Probably a stupid question. How did Train 107 get to Archway station on the Southbound if there was a RGU between it and the tunnel portal?

I think Train 107 came out of the siding at Archway, then into Archway Southbound platform.

[Deleted]

Jun 19, 2011 19:52:11 GMT angelislington said:

... I'll put on my stompy boots!

Oooh! (Cue the Jane Fonda song...)